God Has Nothing to do With It

Of the four new Australian comedy series that launched (on the same day!) a few weeks back, Thank God You’re Here is the biggest, the oldest, and the least interesting. Spanning six seasons and two decades, we all get the idea by now. The twist is, there is no twist. Can you still be funny when you’re running on fumes?

To get the whole “to be fair” business out of the way early, TGYH is a well-oiled comedy machine that delivers consistent entertainment in a polished and professional fashion. The problem isn’t that it’s not funny. The problem is that it’s deliberately designed to be less funny than it could be.

The idea behind TGYH is to turn sketch comedy into a competition. That’s not a secret: there’s a judge on the show and the winner gets a trophy. But once you say “it’s sketch comedy, only it’s a competition”, the massive flaw in proceeding becomes extremely obvious. Does anyone seriously think competition is the way to make sketch comedy funnier?

Perhaps we’re being a little unfair here. Let’s replace “competition” with “prank show”. Because that’s what’s going on: the (celebrity*) contestants are dropped into a situation they know nothing about and have to deal with it. You know, like a prank show. Let’s take a moment to reflect on all the classic comedy sketches over the years. Now, let’s look back on all those iconic prank shows of yesteryear. Yeah, one list is a hell of a lot shorter than the other.

But again, having firmly established that the premise here is to take sketch comedy and somehow make it even shittier – look, we love sketch comedy, but we’ve also seen The Wedge, Comedy Inc: The Late Shift, Open Slather and The Elegant Gentleman’s Guide to Knife Fighting – let’s be reasonable. Maybe what sketch comedy needs in the 21st century is that hint of danger you get from a performer who has no idea what they’re doing?

Good luck finding that on TGYH, a show with so many safety nets this sentence is in danger of becoming one of those “more somethings than a something convention held atop something mountain in the heart of something-astan during something season” jokes they did to death on Blackadder. The idea is to take improv – a form of comedy that is only ever funny because there’s a chance everything could go wrong – and remove any chance of anything going wrong. Yay?

This means each week we get to watch a series of sketches where the supporting cast’s one job is to (be funny? – ed) desperately prevent the unexpected from taking place. And if that means preventing the contestant from getting laughs, well, strap yourselves in and enjoy the ride.

When a contestant comes up with a funny direction to take things, they’re gently steered back on course. When a contestant provides a set-up that anyone else on stage could get a laugh from, they’re gently steered back on course. And as “the course” is just a series of set-ups where the contestant has to make up funny punchlines, if they’re not good at that exact form of comedy… we got nothing.

One of the things that’s kind of obvious with this revival is that when TGYH was created, there was a much, much deeper talent pool for producers Working Dog to tap into. Regular sketch comedy was still a thing (just); loads of people had cycled through sketch series that ran for months each year. Not only did TGYH work as a counterpoint to regular sketch comedy, they could use performers who knew how it worked.

Something else that livened up proceedings was the occasional strong performer willing to take over the sketch and get laughs their way. The old TGYH would have them on a semi regular basis, in part because there were a number of established comedians around who were Working Dogs’ peers rather than juniors – they had enough status to say “if I’m coming on your show, I’ll do things my way”. These days the contestants are almost always WD employees or relative newcomers: they don’t have the clout to mess with the format.

Now what we get is a): mostly stand up comedians because sketch comedy is dead, and b): a sharp divide between people who are good at this kind of thing and those who are not. Each week you can either watch comedians who make it look easy, or comedians who tend to just say the most obvious answers and maybe get a laugh that way.

What you really want are comedians who fall in between. They might be good at this, or they might stuff it up – let’s find out! But the shallow talent pool and subsequent repeat appearances mean there’s next to none of those fresh faces left**. And performance-wise you rarely saw much of that uncertainty to begin with, thanks to all the “remove any chance of anything going wrong” business we mentioned earlier.

In 2024 TGYH is the solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. We don’t need a fresh new take on sketch comedy, because there is no other sketch comedy. We don’t need a format to showcase big names too busy to work on a sketch show, because if you made a regular sketch show you’d have no trouble finding talented performers desperate for air time. We don’t need a show that turns comedy into a competition, because the only comedy left on television is competition-based comedy.

What we do need is a show that’s doing its level best to be as funny as possible. And TGYH isn’t it.

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*a big part of the format’s appeal is that the audience is already familiar with the comedians from elsewhere, so much of the thrill comes from seeing a well-known face in a new situation. A comedy premise that was a lot easier to pull off in 2006 than in 2024.

**there probably are, but Working Dog currently have a very firm roster and you’re not seeing a lot of unknowns making it onto that list at the moment. A new talent showcase TGYH is not, despite the format being perfect for new talent – either make the show a full-on star celebrity showcase where everything is safe, or bring in new talent, ditch the guard rails, and make it a slightly more structured version of Theatre Sports.